Unfortunately, the UN response was far from historic. You may have also seen the UN Climate Summit’s branding last week: “I’m for Climate Action.” At first glance, that may seem like a good thing. We want action on climate, right? However, what the UN calls “Climate Action” is not the kind of action that communities around the globe need, so much so that members of the Climate Justice Alliance called the UN Climate Summit "little more than a pep rally pushing carbon trading offsets and weak voluntary or limited pledges for emission cuts leading up to the global climate treaty negotiations in Paris next year."

President Obama’s response was disappointing as well. He shared the UN's rhetoric about “taking action” and “reducing emissions” yet the pledges the US made will not get us anywhere close to where we need to be in order to prevent major climate catastrophes.

Insufficient Pledges: “With the weak voluntary pledges made under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)… emissions will be… about 30% more than the maximum amount the earth can handle, according to science... The United States ratified its current weak pledge of 3% of emission cuts by 2020 compared to 1990 levels, which means that they will do even less than what was agreed for the first period of the Kyoto Protocol which they never ratified and which ended in 2012.”

Weak Financing: “The other key point to assess is funding for developing countries that are suffering from climate change while being the least responsible for the problem… Based on what happened at the New York Summit, there would be no significant increase in funding for developing countries from public sources in developed countries.”

Clever Packaging of Markets: "For Ban Ki-moon, some heads of state, the business sector and the World Bank, the Climate Summit was a success because, from the beginning, their aim was not to close the emissions gap or to fill the Green Climate Fund. Rather, they sought to use this event – which is not part of the official process of UN negotiations – to launch more initiatives and carbon markets and to use the “summary of the chair” (Ban Ki-moon) as a way to introduce these proposals in the coming official negotiations in Lima, Peru, this December."

Despite inaction from global leaders, the People's Climate activities made last week historic. But what happens next matters even more. GGJ is organizing on the Road to Paris for the UNFCCC COP21 meetings in December 2015. Between now and then, global movements are coming together through a People’s Climate process to push global leaders to take the kind of climate action that frontline communities need.

Follow Grassroots Global Justice on Facebook and Twitter to stay tuned for next steps in this historic People’s Climate Process.

See below to check out some of our favorite articles and news coverage from this past week:

Our Power Campaign leaders were three of the first five people interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now’s live coverage of the march (Jihan Gearon of Black Mesa Water Coalition at min 14:00, Elizabeth Yeampierre of Uprose at min 21:00, and Michael Leon Guerrero of Climate Justice Alliance at min 31:00).